Flamin’ Groovies – "Shake Some Action" (1976)

How special is "Shake Some Action"?  Here's a 2001 customer review from Amazon:

I couldn't have said it better myself.   (I probably wouldn't have written that "very little in all of human creative endeavor" matches this song for fear of sounding a little over-the-top, but that's pretty much exactly how I feel about this song.)

The Flamin' Groovies

You may have never heard of the Flamin' Groovies.  They put out several major-label albums between 1969 and 1979, but none of those albums were big sellers, and they never had a big hit single. 

And you may have never heard "Shake Some Action."  If you haven't, we need to cure that toot sweet.

Click here to listen to "Shake Some Action."  Take a listen to it – better yet, take two or three listens – and then we'll talk some more.

I don't know what makes "Shake Some Action" such a great song.  It's got a great little opening hook, and a great chorus.  But I think the key to the song's greatness is that it immediately gets into a perfect rhythmic groove that it never loses.  It's one-third Stones, one-third Creedence Clearwater Revival, and one-third something that's even better than either of them.

Pitchfork's Joe Tangari wrote that "Shake Some Action" is "a minor masterpiece of jangling, harmony-soaked guitar pop . . . that piles wave upon wave of hooks on a solid backbeat, all wrapped up in big, wet reverb.  It's a classic in every way except one: Almost nobody's heard it." 

Comparing "Shake Some Action" to another song on the Shake Some Action album, Rollingstone reviewer Gaylord Fields had this to say: "[T]he title song is a different, nastier animal with a riff so tough, propulsive and universal it's a wonder that it's not currently being used to hawk bluejeans or vacation cruises."  (One of the songs the Flamin' Groovies covered on that album was the Stones' "She Said Yeah," which recently was used to hawk Bleu de Chanel men's fragrance.) 

The Flamin' Groovies were always either ahead of their time, or behind it, or both.  That may explain why they were not a big commercial success.  Here's more from Pitchfork's Tangari:

[NOTE: In other words, they weren't the Grateful Dead -- thank goodness.]

The Shake Some Action album cover

That raucous, explosive version of the band lasted until 1972, when original vocalist Roy Loney left and guitarist Cyril Jordan took the reins, moving them to Britain.  There, they hooked up with roots rocker Dave Edmunds, who produced a session for them that pointed toward a distinctly different path, one deeply indebted to the British Invasion sounds that everyone else had moved on from.

Amongst their Stones-influenced cuts lay two of the most exquisite power-pop tracks of the 70s, "You Tore Me Down" and "Shake Some Action", which gave its title to the album the band made in 1976 after a lengthy recording hiatus.  Shake Some Action was in every sense both a comeback and a re-invention, and it's been rightly championed by collectors and critics extolling its effortless pop perfection.  If it had been released in 1966, it could have been a smash and a popular landmark, but a decade later, [it] sank like a stone in the marketplace. 

Since you didn't buy the LP when it was originally released in 1976, and you didn't buy the CD release in 2005, you have 2 or 3 lines to thank for the fact that you didn't go to your grave having never heard "Shake Some Action."